the old forests, uprooting, hurling to the ground, and scattering everything that encountered its fury.  Houses, barns, haystacks, fences, trees, everything were prostrated, and to this day its track is visible in the swath it mowed through the old woods, from sixty to a hundred rods wide, plain and distinct still, for miles and miles.  It was not of that tornado, however, that I propose to speak.  Others had preceded it, and in the country all about Angelica were what were called ‘windfalls.’  These windfalls were neither more nor less than the old tracks of these whirlwinds and tornadoes, that had swept down the forest trees.  Fire had finished what the whirlwind begun.  In time, blackberry-bushes had grown up among the charred trunks of the old pines, and other trees, bearing an immensity of fruit; and it was a pleasant resort for young people, one of those windfalls, when the blackberries were ripe and luscious.  These windfalls were great places, too, for rabbits, partridges, and ’such small deer,’ and it was no great thing to boast of, to kill a dozen or two of the birds of an afternoon.

“I went out with a friend one day to one of these windfalls, partly after blackberries, and partly for partridges.  We were both boys, younger than fifteen, then, and each possessing, probably, quite as much discretion as valor.  We had separated a short distance from each other, he to gather berries, and I, with a small fowling-piece, in pursuit of game.  Presently I saw my friend crashing through the brush towards me, and also towards the fields, without his basket, and bare headed, his hair standing straight up, putting in his very best jumps, as if a thousand tigers were at his heels.  Without heeding for a moment my anxious inquiries as to what was the matter, he kept right on, leaping the logs like a deer, looking neither to the right hand nor the left, but with his coat tail sticking out on a dead level behind, making a straight wake for home.  Fear is said to be contagious, and I believe in the doctrine that it is so.  I caught it bad; and without knowing what I was afraid of, I started, and if any fourteen year old boy can make better time than I did on that occasion, I should like to see him run.  I kept possession of my fowling-piece, and came out neck and neck with my friend.  We scrambled over the outer fence, and ran some dozen rods or more in the open field, without either of us looking back.  Then, however, we made the astounding discovery, that there was nothing after us, and we both paused to take breath, and, so far as I was concerned, to ascertain, if possible, what had occasioned the race.  I learned that my friend, after I left him, had gone into the windfall, and was standing upon the long trunk of a fallen tree, picking berries, when he saw, a few rods from him towards the other end of the log on which he was standing, a great black hand reach up and bend down a tall blackberry-bush that was loaded with berries.  This alarmed him